Business Insight Zone

If I let myself get lazy, it’s easy for my desk — and my mind — to look like this:

I exaggerate slightly. But the bigger the piles get, the less work I get done, and the less freely my ideas flow. So when the backlog starts to mount, I use a simple trick that helps me get a grip on things: I explode the stack.

In my dreams — at least when my work gets most overwhelming — this might look something like this:

In real life, though, the “fall back and nuke it from orbit” approach is often not the best way to proceed, at least if you want to stay on good terms with the clients and colleagues who are counting on you to get the things done that you’ve promised to them.

So, when I say “explode,” I mean it in the sense of “exploded drawing”:

Pull apart all the pieces, like a mechanic taking apart an engine to diagnose or rebuild it. If you can, do it physically. The mechanic would spread out the pieces on a workbench, or a drop cloth on the garage floor. Unless you have oily machine parts on your desk, a conference table will probably work better for your papers — but I’ve even used the carpet next to my desk, in a pinch.

What exploding the stack enables:

• An instant purge. When you spread it all out, you may realize that some of what’s there is redundant or superceded. Throw it in the recycling or the shredder without remorse.
• Grouping like with like. I’m always amazed at the themes that emerge when I review my collected notes, printouts, etc. Plenty of articles I write come to life this way, once I realize that my ideas have been trending in particular directions. Bonus: grouping like with like often shows you even more that can be filed or discarded.
• Prioritization. It’s too easy to say “Everything’s a priority” — even though that’s nonsense. Seeing all your stuff laid out in front of you often helps to make priorities clear. (More on this below.)
• Killing off unworthy tasks. This is connected to prioritization, but sometimes it’s only when I explode my stacks that I realize that no, I don’t have the time to spare for Item X, because seeing it alongside Items A, B, C, and D makes it obvious that Item X is trivial.

Questions to drive the process:

• What’s most important? Look over the panoply of to-do’s and could-do’s spread out in front of you. If you had to pick JUST ONE of them to do, which one would it be? Figuring this out can tell you a lot about the entire contents of your stack; in fact, I’ve found that sometimes when I answer this question, the rest of the stack becomes irrelevant — or at least can be put in a drawer for a while.
• What’s close to completion? If your stack of obligations has been weighing you down, sometimes the best thing you can do is to chalk up a victory, even a tiny one, in the early going. Or, as I put it recently, sometimes what you need is one layup to get you going. Pick one quick thing off the stack, finish it, and do a little victory dance.
• What’s awaiting someone else’s action? Going through a backlog of papers often jogs the memory. Maybe you need to ping someone about their part in a project, their decision on a certain issue, etc.
• What needs to be handed off? It also feels like a tiny victory when you look at a stack of 50 things and realize that five of them can be handed off immediately to someone else. You just lopped off ten percent!

Extending this practice:

So far I’ve been talking about physical stacks of paper. But everything I’m saying can also apply to other settings. I “explode the stack” when my inbox gets overcrowded, for example. It also works if you have an online queue of programming jobs, project tasks, CRM entries, or the like. It works if you’re attacking a pile of old boxes in your attic.

In fact, you wanna know a secret? Writing this very post is one step by which I’m “exploding the stack” that has accumulated in my blog drafting file.

Have you used this technique or something like it? What would you add to the tips I have here?

~

(Desk photo by kk+; fireball photo by Focal Intent; exploded-drawing image by schoschie.)

Category: Productivity